The museum floor was a graveyard of ambition—shattered relics, sundered statues, and the inert bodies of the Teen Titans strewn like fallen myths. Cracks webbed across the walls like veins, pulsing with a sickly, rhythmic thrum. And at the center of it all, a monster stood smiling.
The demon—grotesque, shifting, and wrong—wore Slade's face like a theater mask carved from living shadow. A parody of human form. His molten red eyes locked onto Wildcard, burning with infernal purpose.
Around them, the silence was deafening. The Titans twitched faintly, caught in private hells spun from the deepest threads of their subconscious.
Wildcard's gaze swept over the fallen. He didn't know them well enough to mourn—but he studied them all the same, his mind a battlefield of calculation.
A mind-link attack at this scale? Sustained, ritual-based. Anchored in the Heart. High-level arcane structure… but laced with desire. No. Not desire. Obsession.
A thrill—clean and cold—ran down his spine.
He had found a worthy foe.
Then it hit him.
A wave of pure psychic pressure surged from the demon, a spectral hand clawing toward his mind. It came not with a roar, but a whisper—a silk-laced promise of indulgence: power without restraint, control without consequence. Every unspoken hunger he had ever buried screamed to the surface.
Wildcard's head jerked—but the resonance flared inside him like a bell tolling in a storm.
The Mind-Shielded Resonance held firm.
The tendril met an invisible wall—and sizzled into nothing.
His golden eyes flashed—then burned crimson, spinning into Three Tomoe Sharingan. The world bent around him, and in that moment, he saw it all: the shimmering threads of psychic filth binding each Titan, the subtle rot of corrupted yearning. His vision dissected the ritual in fractal layers.
Then he saw Jinx.
Her body shuddered. Her pink aura crackled and spasmed like a broken neon sign. She was slipping under.
"Jinx!" he barked, voice sharp as lightning.
She staggered, clutching her temples. "What the heck is going on? My head—it's like someone's rewiring my brain with a fork!"
Wildcard didn't waste time. With a swift motion, he pulled his half-damaged mask from his belt—worn, black cloth with a blue scouter lens glowing faintly—and pressed it to her face. The dampeners in the mask activated, synchronizing with his chakra pulse and pushing back the invading fog.
Jinx gasped and coughed violently, then slumped against him, eyes wide and terrified—but lucid.
And then—
A voice, smooth as polished obsidian, cut through the air.
"You deny my gift?" the demon purred, his tone dripping with honeyed amusement. "You deny it to her? How… delicious. But even stars fall, in time."
The museum grew impossibly still. Time felt like it was holding its breath. No falling debris. No creaking walls. Only the pulsing Crimson Heart, and the demon's breath, hot and humid like a jungle at midnight.
Smoke curled off Wildcard's armor, cracked and steaming in places. One gauntlet sparked. His mask now hung off one ear, revealing a sliver of jawline smeared with blood. Yet the Sharingan in his eye still spun—slower now, but steady. Watching. Judging.
Across from him, the demon stood cloaked in undulating shadows. His smile was too wide. His voice too pleasant. He was temptation wrapped in bone and fire, his presence thick with mythic hunger.
Wildcard's hand drifted to his sword hilt.
"You keep whispering from behind someone else's skin…" he muttered, low and steady, hunger rising behind his words. "So why don't you stop pretending—and tell me what I'm about to kill."
The demon's grin widened. His voice dropped into a velvet snarl.
"Names," he said, "are such small, human things."
Then he stepped forward, uncoiling.
"But if you must know…"
His arms spread. Behind him, ghostly mirages of the Titans writhed—trapped in dreams they could not wake from.
"I am the first whisper in your spine when desire blooms—before thought. Before shame."
"I wear your silence like a crown. I feed on the prayers you're too afraid to speak."
"The saints deny me. The wicked court me. But all of you... belong to me in the end."
"I am not temptation. I am the acceptance of it. The last step before the fall."
He took another step, shadows thickening behind his heels.
"Prince of Lust. Sovereign of the Unmade. The hunger your kind dares not name."
A final beat. Then, with a predator's smile:
"You may call me Asmodeus."
He opened his arms, mock-theatrical. Behind him, the air shimmered with ghostly mirages trapped in their personal oblivions, writhing, lost.
"I am what your kind buries," Asmodeus whispered, voice reverent now. "The ember left smoldering in Eden's ashes. The serpent behind the dream. I am the yes you were taught to strangle."
He leaned in slightly, voice dropping to a hiss.
"I don't tempt. I uncover. I don't steal. I reveal. You brought your darkness here yourself, Wildcard. I only lit the candle."
Wildcard's expression didn't shift. But his Sharingan pulsed harder.
"You're not power," he said flatly. "You're rot. A craving in a gilded box."
Asmodeus's grin widened—cracking slightly at the edges, inhuman.
"Funny. I was about to say the same of you. The disciplined prodigy. The righteous killer. Always watching. Always holding back."
He stepped into Wildcard's space, just shy of touching.
"Tell me… do you even know what you want? Or are you just afraid it's me?"
Wildcard tilted his head, a faint smile ghosting across his bloodied lip.
"I know exactly what I want."
A pause. The air vibrated.
"I want to feel you break—inch by inch—beneath every strike I land."
The ground quaked faintly beneath him.
"I want to carve your name into the bones of this world…"
"So even hell remembers who ended you".
"To burn every inch of you out of this world."
A beat.
"Slowly. And completely."
Then lightning danced at his feet. His form blurred—vanishing in a flash of speed and thunder. The storm had chosen its target.
***
Asmodeus's fury pulsed through the walls like a living fever. Tendrils—veins of want and withering lust—lashed from the floor and ceiling, screeching as they missed their prey. They snapped and twisted like starved vipers.
From the black, he spoke—voice velvet and venom.
"Tell me, Wildcard… how long will you keep dancing before you shatter?"
"Oh, I'm enjoying this plenty," Wildcard said, voice edged with thrill. "You're just upset I don't break the way you want me to."
Asmodeus's face—Slade's stolen visage—twisted, not in rage, but in perverse delight. His molten-red eyes glowed with sadistic intelligence.
"On the contrary, my tempestuous guest... I never want you to break right away. Where's the pleasure in that?"
***
Above them, the ceiling dripped with crimson ichor. Statues wept blood. Portraits twisted in agony, their painted faces stretched into silent screams. The museum was no longer a place—it was a body, soulbound to the Crimson Heart, and Asmodeus was its pulsing will.
"Every strike you make, every breath you steal… I taste it," he whispered. "Your resistance. Your discipline. Your fear of surrender. It's delicious."
Wildcard's Sharingan flared again, calculating a dozen vectors of incoming psychic pressure. He sensed it now—the deeper rhythm, the ritual pattern. With every move he made, Asmodeus siphoned more from the Titans. He wasn't just feeding off their minds—he was amplifying the ritual by fighting Wildcard.
"He's baiting me... feeding off my rhythm."
Then louder:
"You talk a lot for someone trying to hide how this all falls apart the second I find your Heart again."
Asmodeus chuckled—deep, silk-wrapped menace.
"And yet… here you are. Drowning in your defiance. Still dancing in my temple. Still breathing, because I let you."
He stepped forward. The shadows pulled away like curtains. His demonic form shimmered—half-tangible, a ruinous echo of lust and wrath in perfect harmony.
"Let me ask you, Wildcard. What do you crave, when no one's watching? What do you beg for in your darkest hour, when silence is your only judge?"
Wildcard froze.
A half-second too long.
The air shifted.
"You fight like someone who's tasted loss," Asmodeus whispered. "You protect like someone afraid to feel again. That's why you keep yourself sharpened like a blade—because you're terrified of rusting in someone else's arms."
Wildcard exhaled—then grinned. Slow. Sharp. Battle-lust in his gaze.
"That's cute. You think I'm afraid of feeling?" "You should be afraid that I've learned how to weaponize it."
A lightning crackle surged from his boots—Lightning Overdrive: Recoil Surge. The floor split beneath him. Chakra wind hissed to life as his Veil of the Hidden Current cloaked his form in mist and momentum.
"Let's see what happens when I stop dancing to your rhythm."
Asmodeus turned just in time to see the Sharingan gleam—three tomoe spiraling with surgical intent.
But Wildcard didn't strike at Asmodeus.
He shot past him.
His Sharingan locked not on the demon—but on the lines of crimson light coursing through the air.
His twin blades spun. His eyes pulsed with Keen Focus: Ritual Dissection, dissecting the siphoning matrix with surgical precision.
He struck.
One thread snapped—then two.
Then three.
And another.
The Crimson Heart pulsed erratically—off-beat, wounded. The museum groaned. Ghost-light flickered over the Titans' unconscious forms.
A tremor went through the museum like the gasp of a dying god.
Asmodeus jerked, composure cracking for just a blink. Pain bled through his charm like oil on silk.
"Ahh…" he hissed. "So you are clever."
His body flexed like a serpent beneath skin.
"But clever men… bleed the same."
Wildcard's sword whirled again—toward a thick, pulsing artery of energy feeding the ritual's core.
Asmodeus didn't block.
He laughed.
"Yes! Strike deeper, my storm! Sever it all!" "Because the moment you break the last thread… I'm the only thing left staring back."
He staggered slightly, shadows twitching.
"Ah… clever little parasite… You think if you cut my veins, the hunger stops?"
His body trembled—part in pain, part in thrill.
"No. Now it just needs to eat faster."
The Crimson Heart pulsed again—once, twice—then erupted in a flash of blood-red light.
The blast knocked back everything in the hall.
***
End of chapter.